The Grey Tribe

Ok to clarify: my catchphrase "he knows more about quantum mechanics than economics" does not indicate that the subject knows anything about quantum mechanics.

I just saw a gifset that split the word "beautiful" into 3 gifs and I think this one may be the new t hanos

You’re laughing. She has a urinary tract infection and you’re laughing

some notes based on my travels

THIS. The obsession with biological childen, to the extent of undergoing expensive procedures and even renting a woman's body, has always seemed creepy to me. Like why commodify women's bodies when you could give an already born child a home. Entitlement at its finest.

And it seems to be mostly men who can't get past a kid not being "theirs" like they can literally only imagine loving a kid when it's a genetic extension of them, otherwise no, it's so narcissistic. I know some women also want biological kids, but women are far more likely to be willing to adopt and love a child regardless of its biological makeup. Yet more proof men are incapable of real love.

Where do I even start with this? I mean, this is coming from “radfems” who are conservatives’ sideblogs a good amount of the time, so i rather doubt that the obvious genocidal implications are accidental.

Like "you are not entitled to sex", this is straightforwardly true but flips real easily into "you aren't allowed to be sad about not getting it or ever attempt to get it from other consenting adults". And then the opposition is all "it's natural to want those things and anyone who stands against you is a selfish bitch and/or enemy of civilisation" and it's a total shit-up.

You also have to realise women are obsessed with biological children. Most women, not even rich Chinese women, are going to go full Seveneves about getting a little eugenics project to play with, but most men don't either. What women do go for (if it's propaganda invented by men, women are engaging in it now!) are soft, sanitised image of skinny-yet-firm-skinned women with infants that recently exited their bodies; AND for women treating the children they're raising better in accordance with genetic similarity.

Women also get more social status from adopting and (allegedly) loving a kid who isn't biologically theirs, men don't have the incentive to brag about their kid being adopted or post on main about the angst involving in getting the kid. This seems weird when you look at MRAs' reasonable horror at the "being forced to pay for cheating girlfriends' kid" scenario and unreasonable level of attention devoted to it, but men who want to brag about being providers can do that fine for biokids. Well, women can brag about loving the ungrateful bastards when it's their biokids too, but it seems… different.

AI art was at it's scariest at around the dall-e 2 phase, when it was actually capable of imitating a breadth of styles and was still kinda fun and frictionless to play with. the tools have diminished in functionality, gotten more cumbersome and expensive to use, and all these improvements and backend prompt-engineering have given AI art a distinctive airbrushed "look" that is instantly recognizable. the specter of the future just isn't what it used to be

this is on openai's official demonstration, and it shows such a clear decline. i maybe would have been fooled by the one on the left, the one on the right is not only NOT an oil painting, it looks extremely AI generated in a way that everyone has learned to detect at this point. no one should be scared of this anymore, the only useful or even legible AI art is going to be coming from dedicated hobbyists crafting their own models from scratch. you still need experience to make art.

honestly i'm sorta confused by this also, because yeah, the left one is i think a better example of "an expressive oil painting" and actually shows a glass of milk, not a milk swirl with a bit of glass near it in unspecified ways

driving down to Oakland! if I don’t make it, please remember me as I was: someone accustomed to driving on the left

what farming items in mmorpgs has taught me: i used to think using ice trays to make ice cubes was free but after thinking about it i have to pay the electric bill to power the freezer so every moment that i’m not freezing new trays of ice cubes is a moment that i’m underutilizing the freezer and increasing the cost of ice cubes. i have to constantly swap out ice trays for new ice cubes on an hourly rotation on a 24 hour basis or else i won’t produce the maximum amount of ice cubes possible and will underutilize the full potential of my electric bill. i need to stop using all other appliances and utilities in my home to make more ice cubes

this would keep me up at night and slowly drive me insane if I didn't know that freezers have thermostats and insulation and don't run at full blast all the time, only sometimes or if you put in warm stuff like new ice trays.

Apparently people associated with Bank of America do have @ bofa.com email addresses

i truly understand the temptation of people who make merch when a funny doodle of theirs goes viral because if I could get money from that stupid anon reaction image people apparently still use I would easily do #sellout #greed

like imagine if a three second doodle you did could pay off your student loans at the cost of people online calling you annoying, or possibly sending a pipe bomb to your house. many would find themselves tempted by the devil dare I say

I am still upset about the passing of Donald Sutherland. Here is an article from GQ that I like in which he talks about why he begged Gary Ross to give him the role of President Snow.

Nobody asked me to do it [play Snow]. I wasn’t offered it [the role]. I like to read scripts, and it captured my passion. I wrote them a letter. The role of the president had maybe a line in the script. Maybe two. Didn’t make any difference. I thought it was an incredibly important film, and I wanted to be a part of it. I thought it could wake up an electorate that had been dormant since the ’70s. I hadn’t read the books. To be truthful, I was unaware of them. But they showed my letter to the director, Gary Ross, and he thought it’d be a good idea if I did it. He wrote those wonderfully poetic scenes in the rose garden, and they formed the mind and wit of Coriolanus Snow.

in 2017, government documents revealed that Sutherland had been on a NSA watchlist due to his anti-war [Vietnam War] activities. Here's an article where his son, Keifer Sutherland, talks about how the FBI raided their house when he was a kid.

I'd just like to point out that Donald Sutherland's father in law, Tommy Douglas, led the first socialist government in North America and is the architect behind Canada's healthcare system.

Okay. It's time for an AI rant.

My nephew is 13 years old. Whenever he writes a paper for school, I check it over and fix all of his mistakes for him. He said to me, "Maybe I'll proofread your paper for you in exchange," meaning one of the scholarly articles I write for work. I said, "Cool," and gave him the file. And he said, "Well, this is full of errors! See, you always say you have a lot to correct on my stuff, and look at all the stuff you got wrong!" And I said, surprised, "What? Where?" Because I'm sure there are typos in the draft I sent him, but not, like, that many.

And then he pointed to the screen and said, "Look at all the blue and red lines you have."

And I said, "Yeah, but those are wrong. Like, those are blue and red lines I'm ignoring because the computer is wrong." And then I paused and added, "You know you can't proofread a paper by just looking at the red and blue lines, right?" And he gave me the blankest look, because that clearly is EXACTLY what he thinks. And it became even clearer suddenly why, whenever I correct something on his paper, his immediate reaction is, "It didn't have a blue or red line."

There's a very good reason for that: THAT'S BECAUSE THE COMPUTER ISN'T SMART ENOUGH TO KNOW THAT IT WAS WRONG.

I am so tired of being sold the idea that computers are better than humans and so we should just outsource everything to them, which is clearly the lesson my nephew is absorbing in U.S. middle school. COMPUTERS ARE NOT BETTER THAN HUMANS. Like, maybe they are better at humans at crawling through rubble to find people trapped inside. They are also better at preserving things in a searchable format. Things like that. Very limited circumstances.

I don't want to sound alarmist but everything I hear about people using generative AI freaks me out. It's not just that I'm freaked out by people being like, "I use it to write novels!" (Although I don't see how they do, I have tried to have it write fiction for me and the output was truly terrible.) But I recognize my bias around creative writing and so no one needs to credit my views on artificial writing. But! Other things are alarming, too! "I use it to brainstorm x, y, or z." But...why? Why not just...use your own brain...to...brain...storm? The computer doesn't even have a brain to brainstorm with! And you might be like, "But it comes up with things that my brain would never think of!" So would other people! You could also brainstorm with other people! Or even through Google to see what other people have thought before you (not AI). Please don't belittle the wonder of thinking.

I just feel like the marketing around generative AI boils down to "Wouldn't it be easier not to use your own brain to think about things?" Everyone. No. It would not be. Please just trust me on this. I'm not just an old person who is out of touch with technology or something. I promise. USE YOUR BRAINS. IT WILL BE OKAY.

My parents' desktop has 1997 Microsoft Word on it and the automated spelling and grammar checker is almost always right.

Now i have some 20years more recent form of word and the grammar checker is noticeably worse.

But it's not as bad as google docs, which literally replaces correctly spelled words with other words, sometimes themselves spelled incorrectly.

I feel like there are two separate phenomena here.

The first is people expecting computers to be infallible. You wouldn't accuse a calculator of making a math error, right? This is what leads to people confidently citing nonexistent sources that ChatGPT made up with the same confidence they would cite a case they found using Google Scholar; it simply didn't occur to them that the machine could be wrong in that way. Given that grammar and spelling are almost simple enough formal systems that we can automate them, and grammar/spelling checkers are usually right (especially if you're a kid who makes a lot of basic mistakes), it's not surprising people might make this mistake.

The second is expecting computers to be more convenient than people, to be faster or cheaper or whatever. This is IMO much more defensible when it comes to LLMs, which genuinely can be more convenient than doing a task yourself or finding a person of equivalent skill to the LLM, but it can also definitely be a trap. Similarly, as a programmer, the instinct to try and automate tasks can be a good one but can also lead to wasting more time debugging your code than it would have taken to do the task by hand.

I occasionally use LLMs for stuff that you could arguably describe as brainstorming. LLMs are pretty good at giving you generic lists of things, helping you find words in a very specific category, stuff like that. Sometimes these are questions I could pose to a human, but I don't want to waste their time or I can't be bothered to walk to the next room. Sometimes they aren't. Maybe I have already asked a human if they can think of this word that's on the tip of my tongue and they couldn't, nor could Google, but ChatGPT can. (Or sometimes it can't, but it's worth a try.) Or maybe nobody I know speaks the languages involved, or whatever.

i do think theres something sad about how largely only the literature that's considered especially good or important is intentionally preserved. i want to read stuff that ancient people thought sucked enormous balls

Time to take this post entirely too seriously:

“Climate extinction emergency but we can’t evict a desert shrew for a lithium mine to build utility-scale batteries” is the worst environmentalism just an empty benevolence-coded cudgel for vibes enforcers.

The voice that 99% of cis dudes do if they're tryna do a 'lady' voice leads me to assume, via the logic of relative pitch, that all these motherfuckers think they're Barry White

Don’t people’s voices sound deeper inside their heads?

not by that much

There's a real extent to which if I wanted to sound like I was trying to sound like a woman I'd do a high falsetto, even though most women don't actually talk like that—it effectively signals "femininity" in an almost-purely conventional way.

On the other hand if I want to sound feminine I do something completely different. I read an interesting interview with a male audiobook narrator many years ago, and he commented that when he does female-character voices he actually drops his voice a bit and makes the tone huskier, and that actually makes it read as more feminine to people. And I've tried to adopt ideas like that when I'm, say, reading a book to someone.

But if I wanted to make damn sure everyone knew I was "doing a girl voice" I'd pitch it high. Even though the result would sound less like an actual human woman and more like Mickey Mouse.

Genuine question: why is this fine and doing that thing with your eyes so everyone knows you're pretending to be an east asian person is not?

Because I don't think I've ever heard anyone object to it prior to this conversation? Which does make me substantially less likely to do this in front of you, but I don't think anyone else is really objecting.

Like, a precondition for something being offensive is that someone is offended by it, right? You might argue that logically speaking, that's also sufficient; but if you try to avoid saying anything that anyone anywhere finds offensive you should just skip the middle steps and do a vow of silence.

Now I do think the extreme offensiveness of the eye thing is a little silly, outside of its historical context. Like, people used it to be offensive; so people got offended; so it became the sort of thing only a racist asshole would do, which makes more people offended and makes it more offensive. And I could see a path for "speaking in a falsetto" to follow that pattern, but I definitely don't think it has already.

I mean I see your point from an abstract logical construction. but I think "will anyone actually get offended" is the most important determiner and one that's very different between the two situations.

Like to be clear, in the abstract I think the Extreme Offensiveness of the eye thing is also kinda silly. But in the actual world in which we live in, I know people would be offended by it, so I don't do it. (And everyone knows that, which means that doing it is sending a strong message that you are neutral to positive about offending a whole bunch of East Asian people, and that in itself is offensive. Like, if I carried a sign that said "I want to be offensive to East Asian people because I don't care about their feelings" that would be offensive on its own terms, right?)

I mean, I think the reason the eye thing is offensive or blackface is offensive is because these things didn't exist in a vacuum, they existed as part of a package of signifiers of racial stereotypes, and doing the eye thing doesn't just invoke "playing an oriental character," it invokes a whole package of racist stereotypes. Ditto blackface: the reason blackface is offensive and whiteface isn't is because there isn't a history of people whiting up to play offensive stereotypes of white people in minstrel shows during a period where white people suffered particular oppression that interacted with and reinforced those stereotypes.

Right, that was my (unclearly expressed) point.

I understand, historically, why blackface and the eye thing are offensive. They were used in offensive ways that offended people. they were sometimes used with the explicit intention of offending people, and sometimes with malicious disregard for whether people would be offended. And it got associated with offensive behavior and thus became a free-standing offender.

I don't think falsetto voice is like that. But what is like that is doing falsetto voice to insult someone for being a pussy. (And yes, "for being a pussy" is gendered and potentially offensive in the same way and that was my point.)

Like if my friends want to, I dunno, vandalize a police station, and I'm hesitant to do it and they respond by falsetto-saying "oh hi, I'm jadagul, I'm too much of a nervous bootlicker to stand up to the man!" then that's kind of offensive. Not just to me, but for the association of timidity with femininity. (Or with, like, limp-wristed homosexuality vel sim.)

But at the moment that's not a sufficiently widespread or dominant association with falsetto voice that people treat "doing the falsetto voice" as intrinsically mocking the idea of femininity, so it hasn't stepped into the same minefield.

Hm, given that Loki is British and I'm not, this might just be more salient to them than to me!

(I was thinking I associated it with a couple of Monty Python sketches specifically, but they didn't read to me as especially sexist and also when it's just "two sketches from one group" it doesn't rise to the level of a pattern.)

Yeah pretty much; from my perspective the way it is is "there absolutely consists a long tradition of men dressing up as or putting on voices and caricaturing and mocking women, from the playground to Monty Python to Pantomime to Shakespeare - originating, like blackface, at a time when women were not allowed to appear on the stage at all, and clearly deeply interwoven with a truly brutal history of exploitation and second-class-if-that citizenship.

Out of respect for non-white people's struggle, we've now decided that nobody else can portray them at all - meanwhile, despite huge disparity in available parts for men and women, there are still men portraying Miss Trunchbull and the journalist in Chicago and any number of other Dame roles every day on the stage and nobody thinks there's anything wrong with this or anything related to it, for some reason."

It's just.. incongruous? It's not even that I necessarily want people to act like falsetto ladyvoice is the same as doing the eye thing necessarily? I just find it super weird that they don't, not even a little bit

One thing that has happened in the discussions about blackface is that it's moved from "this is offensive because of a whole mess of historical context" to "this is deontologically Wrong and anyone who does it is a Bad Person". I don't think you believe it is from this thread, but a lot of people do.

I have a friend from Latvia, who says that Latvian theater routinely uses blackface for black characters. Except they don't have a long history of negative portrayals of black people (they have their own set of locally offensive racist stereotypes) and they also don't have a lot of black people, period. So historically for them, blackface is mostly neutral as a concept, akin to costuming.

But Americans tend to look on that with disgust, because blackface has become an unacceptable thing in any circumstances.

And I totally understand why this is the case, for that whole mess of historical context. But it does have some interesting cultural side-effects that basically prevent us being able to go to truly race-blind casting. I think people would (rightly) look with distaste at a film about Jim Crow-era Alabama where George Wallace was played by Mahershala Ali, Martin Luther King, Jr. was played by John Cho, and John Lewis was played by Timothee Chalamet, even if they absolutely knocked the performances out of the park.

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From a mechanistic sense, on vocal pitch:

The falsetto lady thing, outside of theater, has some interesting connections with doing impressions in general. If you want to convey vocal tone, you generally do some sort of impression of the person's delivery. Which sometimes involves pitch shifting.

I have absolutely heard women trying to do low men's voices and they sound ridiculous. But it's a common thing in a lot of movies where the woman is trying to disguise herself among the men, right? (Think Mulan, for example.) And generally when that happens, it is supposed to be ridiculous-sounding. When women are genuinely told how to disguise themselves as men, it's recommended that they try for a light/high tenor. Which makes sense - I'm a light high tenor, and I am almost invariably misgendered on the phone (I also have some long-term sensitivity about the pitch of my speaking voice that makes me speak in a register that is detrimental to my vocal health).

However, if a man has a lower speaking voice than me, they can't actually reach the registers that overlap with ones that are perceived as feminine. Which basically leaves falsetto as the only mechanical option.

This still leaves open the same question of why it is offensive, sometimes, to do an impression of someone? Why is it offensive to do an impression of someone who has an African-American dialect, or Indian, or Japanese, but not to do a British, French, or Russian accent? (I wonder a lot about the "Japanese" question because it basically ticks every possible box that people place for "you have waged massive imperialist expansion and genocide and are therefore in-bounds for cultural appropriation).

That's not really true! In terms of pure pitch, there is very little difference in speaking voices. I can reach the speaking pitch of most basses and I'm literally a soprano. It's mostly factors other than pitch that cause a voice to be read as one gender or another (timbre does come into it; my bass vocal pitch would sound pretty strained which contributes to the 'sounding silly' that you spoke of, but falsetto has even less in common timbre-wise with ways in which people actually speak).

FWIW, I know a guy who shifts his voice up one octave only in English. They tried to teach English with received pronunciation in his high school, and he does a bad impression of the Upperclass Twit Of The Year whenever he speaks English.